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unsubscribe

The penalties for making it hard to unsubscribe include damaging customer relations and brand reputation, getting reported to the authorities, receiving fines, but most likely and perhaps most dangerous of all – being marked as SPAM (unsolicited mail) by recipients.

No matter how well implemented your email marketing campaign is, there will always be those recipients who click on ‘unsubscribe’.

Whether your subject lines are written to be as persuasive as possible, your content has been optimised to the very last character, you’ve segmented and tested to within a gigabyte of an email’s resilience, someone, somewhere will think “not these guys again” and hurl your present and future endeavours into the trash, or even worse… mark it as spam.

Using Econsultancy’s latest Email Marketing Best Practice Guide, I’ll be taking a look at the best practice methods of managing your unsubscribers, with an eye on trying to retain those who do click the ‘unsubscribe’ link by offering them more relevant communication.

Writing about e-commerce, I end up signing up for lots of accounts and newsletters on websites, most of which I’m not necessarily interested in.

Still, this gives me an opportunity to look at how these companies are formatting emails, how frequently they send them and, crucially, how easy it is to unsubscribe.

If people want to unsubscribe from emails, it should be made as easy as possible, as the alternative for many recipients is the report spam option, something which can have an adverse effect on sender reputations with ISPs and therefore deliverability.

Here’s a good example from Fab, and some tips on best practice in this area…

“It’s not you, it’s me. Actually no, it is you. You keep sending me boring, irrelevant emails that I don’t want. Our email relationship was going really well at the beginning but now its fizzled out and I’m unsubscribing from your emails. For one thing, you just send me way too much. It comes across a bit…desperate.”

As an email marketer, does reading this make you cringe? Are you afraid this is what your email subscribers would say to you if they had the chance?

The unsubscribe process doesn’t have to be as painful as a “Dear John” break-up letter, but with the way some brands go about it, it might as well be.